IN A MELLOTONE — No.18 Autumn 2003

A John Harvey/Charlie Resnick Newsletter

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Beginnings don't get a whole lot better than that, the first sentence of Dennis Lehane's marvellous story, 'Until Gwen' which is one of the highlights of Men From Boys, a collection of short fiction I've edited for William Heinemann and which is published in the U.K. this November. No U.S. publisher settled yet, but we're working on it.

The stories cover a wide range of settings and styles, from present-day Alaska to the trenches of the First World War, from the ironies of Reginald Hill to the driving down 'n' dirty of the aforementioned Mr Lehane. My own contribution, 'Chance', centres once again around Jack Kiley, former police officer and - briefly - professional soccer player, now low-rent private eye. In this tale, Jack, who inhabits roughly the same part of north London as Mark Billingham's Detective Inspector Tom Thorne - no coincidence, we used to live a hearty stone's throw away from one another, either side of the Holloway Road - becomes involved with one Jack Duggan, a former acquaintance from his footballing days, now finding it hard to shake off an addiction to gambling.

And yes, there is a Billingham story here, too. Who else, you ask? Well, how about this for a list? Lawrence Block, Andrew Coburn, Michael Connelly, Jeffrey Deaver, Reginald Hill, Bill James, Bill Moody, George P. Pelecanos, Peter Robinson, James Sallis, John Straley, Brian Thompson, Don Winslow and Daniel Woodrell.

Almost all of the stories were written especially for the collection and have not previously appeared elsewhere. This includes 'My Father's Daughter', Andrew Coburn's fine novella, which takes us through three generations of an extended family whose members variously fall to sudden acts of violence or simple self-regarding avarice, and where the strength of purpose and single-mindedness of the father is passed on not to the sons but to the daughter.

...the publication, by Alison and Busby, of the first of an intended annual Best British Mysteries, edited by Maxim Jakubowski.

My own contribution to this is 'Due North', which first saw the light of day in the CWA/Do Not Press collection Crime in the City. One of my personal favourites, I'm pleased that it was chosen, not least as it was a first outing for Frank Elder, who went on to be the central character in the new novel, Flesh and Blood, for which Heinemann have pencilled in a publication date of April 1st. No joke, I trust.

Writing short stories is a strange sort of business - in financial terms often no real business at all - but one that it's possible to become addicted to. For me, part of the pleasure is the simple fact that they are short and therefore, as Raymond Carver pointed out, possible to write within the constraints of time and place. They can also be a way to relax between longer pieces of work, as well as a means of putting new characters through their paces, trying them on for size. Check out Elmore Leonard's 'Karen Makes Out' for instance, (reprinted in his recent collection, Women Who Dance) in which U.S. deputy marshal Karen Sisco, later to feature in the novel - and later, movie - Out of Sight, makes her first try-out appearance.

The other thing that appeals to me is the need to be concise, taut and tight, to try and capture a person or a place in a single phrase or a line of dialogue. No room for flab. No room, as Annie Proulx says, for error either. "The lack of a comma can throw everything off."
"There's a joy," says Donald Westlake. "in watching economy of gesture when performed by a real pro, whatever the art."   He compares writing short stories to playing jazz: "a sense of vibrant imagination at work within a tightly controlled setting.

Jazz - the jazz world - has a place in both 'Favour' and 'Drummer Unknown', the two stories I've finished most recently. 'Favour' was written for a book of ingeniously linked stories, Like a Charm, the brain child of author Karin Slaughter, which will be published in the U.K. by Century and in the U.S. by Morrow. U.K. publication is early February.
'Drummer Unknown', which is set in and around the   burgeoning British be-bop scene of the 1950s, came into being at the behest of writer and editor Robert Randisi for a new collection, Murder... And All That Jazz , which will be published in the U.S. by NAL, also next year.

What else have I been up to? Well, moving home for one thing. After considerable deliberation, not to say dithering, this summer Sarah, Molly and I finally upped sticks and resettled in the south west, the furthest reaches of Cornwall, not so many miles from Lands End. If you're going to go...
We're living in a converted barn, one of a small cluster of dwellings at the end of quite steep, partly made-up lane, with cows and chickens as most of our neighbours and the sea no more than a few fields away.
Painters and sculptors galore have made their home here in the Penwith peninsula, of course, close to St. Ives and Newlyn, and still do. Writers, too.
D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield both lived for a time up the lane from here, in cottages that later belonged to Virginia Woolf. And there are plenty of other, slightly less famous names.
Poet and critic - and jazz editor of Beat Scene - Jim Burns put me on to a recent book by Alison Oldham, Everyone Was Working, which examines the life and work of both artists and writers in and around St. Ives in the years after the Second World War. One of the writers whose work I intend to explore in time is the novelist Norman Levine, whom I ashamed to say I didn't know at all until Jim mentioned him.
Jim Burns, incidentally, has a new volume of poetry out - Take It Easy (Redbeck Press, 2003), with a nicely evocative photograph of a music store, Paris Jazz Corner, on its cover.
To go back to the Lawrence connection for a moment, the first time I moved out of London - way back in the sixties - it was very much into his territory. Based in Nottingham, I was teaching in a secondary school in a small mining town called Heanor, just the other side of the Erewash valley from the similar town of Eastwood, where Lawrence was born and grew up. It's a landscape that he described so well in Sons and Lovers and many of his early stories.
In those days, partly due to the fuss and furore around the Lady Chatterley trial, Lawrence was very much a foregrounded figure and his reputation as a writer far higher than I think it is now. So, even though my only connection to literature was as a teacher rather than even an aspiring writer, there was something positive about moving to an area so strongly associated with an author I admired. Two authors really, for Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was very much a part of the cultural currency of the time.
Lawrence came to loathe the East Midlands and turned his back on the area completely, whereas he seemed to have held this particular part of Cornwall in high esteem, praising its wildness and its beauty. If his German wife, Frieda, hadn't been reported as a potential war time spy, suspected of signalling to enemy naval craft with her washing, they might have stayed longer.
Katherine Mansfield, however, drawn here by Lawrence's presence, could scarcely find a good word to say about the place. She found it desolate and unattractive - "so full of huge stones" - and hated the persistent wind.
Now we recently spent three months in Wellington, the city in New Zealand in which Mansfield was brought up, and I know that for anyone from Wellington to complain about the wind is a bit rich! You thought Chicago was the windy city? Think again.

So, unpacking and acclimatising aside, what have I been up to?

Earlier in the year, still in London, I wrote a young adult novel, Nick's Blues, and I've spent some time working on that, largely incorporating the suggestions of several sixteen year olds who were kind enough to read the manuscript for me, with a wary out for glitches in the dialogue or the wrong cultural references. That work is more or less at an end - at least, for the present - and soon my agent will be touting it around the various publishing houses.
In the wake of my adaptation of A. S. Byatt's Frederica Quartet, BBC Radio have asked Shelley Silas and myself to turn Paul Scott's Raj Quartet into an eight hour Classic Serial. A mammoth task and one for which Shelley and I have both started reading assiduously, marker pens in hand.
Looming larger than anything, however, is the follow-up to Flesh and Blood, a second Frank Elder novel, as yet not quite titled and currently little more than a scattering of notes on the squared pages of my trusty Rhodia No. 19 A4 writing bloc. To be transferred from thence on to a large white board before the process of writing begins. Soon but not yet.
Finally, I'd like to draw your attention to an event at the Derby Dance Centre on Saturday, 18th October. For the final night of the Derby Festival of Words, I'm reading jazz pieces with the band Second Nature. We're in the Centre's Cafˆ© Vertigo at 9.30pm and before that, at 8.00, Jackie Kay is reading from and talking about her work. Aside from being a fine writer, Jackie's a brilliant reader and if you're thinking of coming to hear me with the band, splash out on a joint ticket and see her too. Details of prices etc. from the Festival Box Office on 01332 255800.

John Harvey,
September 2003
Lower Tregarthen, Zennor,
St. Ives, Cornwall
TR26 3BP
U.K.

Autumn 2003 Playlist